5. Rowan
ROWAN
IN DEFENSE OF HIDE I don’t stand in orange-paneled rooms and let humans invade my personal space.
But my feet seem to have taken root in the floorboards.
I watch her face, waiting for the moment she realizes she’s too close, waiting for that slide—the natural instinct of humans to look away from me.
It doesn’t happen. She looks right at me without flinching as she hands me the shirt.
“You want it?” she asks.
“I require it for reconnaissance.” It’s a lie, and a poor one. I don’t need a cotton garment to understand the enemy. I want the shirt because it acknowledges the truth in a joking manner.
“Reconnaissance,” she repeats, her lips twitching. “Right. You’re going to wear the merchandise to study the tourists who buy the merchandise. It’s very meta, Rowan. Very deep-cover.”
“I need to understand the visual language they respond to,” I say, leaning into the lie because it’s safer than the alternative.
“Uh-huh. Well, the visual language costs twenty-four dollars plus tax. But since you’re technically a local conservation consultant, I’ll give you the staff discount. Twenty percent off.”
She walks to the register at the front of the shop. I follow her, the shirt draped over my arm. Outside, the “Bigfoot Expert” from earlier—Barnaby—is gesturing wildly as he explains something to a group of bored teenagers. The man looks like he’s never spent a night alone in the dark.
Wren rings up the sale without looking at the screen, her fingers moving over the buttons from memory. I pull my wallet out of my pocket. The leather is old, the edges worn smooth by decades of use. I lay two twenties on the counter.
“Keep the change,” I say.
“I can’t keep the change. It messes up the drawer count.” She counts out my change and slides it over to me. “You really are ancient, aren’t you? Nobody says ‘keep the change’ unless they’re in a noir film or over eighty.”
“I’m older than eighty,” I say.
She snorts as she bags the shirt in a brown paper sack. As she hands it to me, she pauses. “Why are you still here? Usually, when people are as annoyed with me as you were earlier, they drive away in a cloud of gravel.”
“I’m not people,” I say.
“Clearly.” She lets go of the bag. “But you’re still standing in my gift shop. Do you have more ecological warnings, or are you just waiting for the cider?”
I take a moment to study her. She’s tired.
I can see it in the slight slump of her shoulders.
She also has a habit of rubbing her thumb against the side of her index finger.
I’m not sure she’s even aware she’s doing it.
It’s a stress response. She’s fighting a war against entropy, trying to save a pile of rotting wood and a legacy of debt, and she’s doing it by selling plastic footprints to people who wouldn’t know a track from a tire iron.
It’s absurd, yet impressive, and I’m finding it increasingly difficult to ignore her determination.
“The cedar scent is too strong in here,” I say. “It’s masking the smell of the dry rot over there in the corner. You should check the sill plate.”
Wren sighs, a long, deflating sound. “The sill plate. Great. Add it to the list. Is there anything else the mountain wants me to know? Any other structural failures I should be aware of?”
“The mountain is indifferent to your sill plate,” I say. “I’m the one who has to look at it.”
She looks at me then, and for a second, the sarcasm is gone. There’s a flicker of something softer in her expression—not gratitude, exactly, but an acknowledgment. It’s the look of someone who has been carrying a heavy load and just realized someone else noticed the weight.